Miracles are happening in my life right now. Each of these miracles was born from a decision that Arizona Cardinals Offensive Lineman, Duece Lutui, made on September 7th, 2010.

The power of being in a state of ALL-INness is immeasurable. If you like miracles, and if you like creating them for yourself, then watch these two videos. In them, I tell the story of what’s been transpiring since the first miracle that happened at 9 pm on Wednesday October 27, 2010.

As I say in the video above, the reason there’s not been a blog post in the last 3 months is that I’ve been consuming myself with this creation – the most valuable creation I’ve made to date.

It took a lot of time and work, in part because it’s all new to me and have never done it before, so there was new technology to learn – BUT, it took this long primarily because I honestly put my heart into this particular project in a way I have never done before. I DECIDED to create my greatest invention ever. So I did. And it’s coming soon. Very soon. December 6th, to be exact.

If you’re not receiving my Miraculous Life email bulletin, I ask that you take a moment to get on that list by going here now:

This is where I’ll be making announcements and posting video links about the launch. Plus, it’s a really inspiring forum in which I share some of the most powerful tools you can use to create the life of your dreams!

I sincerely thank you for your support and interest in my blogs, my bulletins, my videos and my mission in this life (which, by the way, is to inspire the world to settle for nothing less than Miraculous Living by engaging in the process of freeing ones’ self from the conditioning of the past and thus experiencing reality as it is – flawless and abundant – and manifesting all our greatest desires with effortless ease). Your support and interest makes it effortless for me to know that I’m fulfilling my own purpose here in this lifetime!

We are so accustomed to being given lists of options for everything from what to order at a restaurant to what career to choose, that most of us have no idea what we really REALLY want in life. We’ve anesthetized our ability to THINK for ourselves about how we most profoundly want to use our miraculous lives.

Afford yourself the luxury of some real private time – some unplugged and uninterrupted time – to reflect on how you would like to use the rest of this Miraculous Life of yours. Regardless of where you are in life, regardless of age, regardless of status, create the time to ask yourself “How now do I truly want my life to be?” And then make a move toward it. Do something you’ve never done before.

It’s true. Hiring a Personal Coach is totally unnecessary. It’s an entirely non-essential service. And that’s precisely why I got into it, and out of Counseling (although Counseling is also non-essential). I shifted because I no longer wanted to focus on ameliorating problems, but rather wanted to spend time helping folks manifest miracles and create dreams.

But none of that needs to happen. So why pay good money to hire a Personal Coach? Because you can. It’s that simple. The same reason you’d do anything in this miraculous life – because you can, but not because you need to.

We get to play the game of creating miracles with this highly improbable life we’ve got.

So coaching isn’t about fixing problems. It’s not about correcting inadequacies. It’s not about changing things in order to become happy (because you don’t need anything to be different in order to feel infinite bliss in this very moment, and every other.) Coaching is about playing the wonderful game of growth. Diving further and further into mastery and making magic – for its own sake. Because that’s fun to do. And the game of discovering new and deeper levels of potential and power never ends. And that’s pretty damn cool.

So why would I hire a coach? To help me free myself from the conditioned beliefs that prevent me from exploding into that greatness, that magic, the miraculousness. To help me liberate myself from the conditioning of my past so that I can experience reality AS IT IS, in all its infinite splendor, and so that I can manifest all my wildest desires with less effort.

Regardless of who you are or what you’re doing with your life, what’s going on around you is a product of what’s going IN you. More specifically, in your mind.

A few weeks ago I did an interview with Michael Allen (http://wp.me/psrwD-1C) in which we discuss the value of Mental Conditioning as it applies to success on the PGA Tour. Last week I recorded another video with my dear friend and mentor, Jim Myers, who has coached hundreds of CEOs on business, leadership and personal development. (That video was audibly challenged, so we’re doing it over – look for it next time.)

It might seem obvious to most people how Mental Toughness is essential to success in professional sports or big business. Every once in a while, if I’m in conversation with someone and happen to mention that I am coaching a youngster, they might say, “For what?! What could a 13-year-old possibly need Mental Toughness Training for?”

The simple answer: for LIFE!

THE OUTER WORLD IS A REFLECTION OF THE INNER WORLD

I often tell folks that I went through graduate school in Psychology and never once had a course – ever – that taught me the fundamentals of mastering my thoughts and emotions. I never had a class that taught me how to strengthen my inner world. It’s not in the curriculum. And yet it’s the most important variable in creating success on any and every possible level!

A strong inner world can effortlessly create confidence, competence, enthusiasm, focus, determination, perseverance, patience, peace and all the psychological states that lead to masterful decision-making, skillful action and phenomenal results.

Someone with all the traditional training, education or physical talent in the world, who doesn’t also have Emotional Intelligence as the foundation, will never sniff true success. They may figure out how to make boatloads of money, or how to accumulate lots of wins on the playing field, but they’ll never be able to enjoy that money or those wins, or what come of them. These folks wait for joy to come from some external source, like wealth, or a certain lifestyle, or a certain degree of recognition or fame, for example. And that cycle of waiting will NEVER end, because the programming of the untrained mind is that there’s never enough. And to make it even worse, they have to work 10 times harder to get there!

Someone with a strong inner world, on the other hand – a trained mind – knows how to create fulfillment, bliss, reward and complete happiness from nothing but the decision to do so, and then prioritizes that choice, makes that decision every day, creates those masterful psychological states, and genuinely and fully enjoys the best results with the least effort. And then people call that person “lucky”. Because they seem to get all the breaks, or life seems to “come easy to them”. And, in a way, they’re right. Success does come easy to the mentally tough. But only after the diligent and consistent hard work of training the mind.

THE OUTER WORLD IS A REFLECTION OF THE INNER WORLD

I applaud people like Debbie Farrelly, the owner of Arizona Dynamics Gymnastics (http://www.azdynamics.com/index.htm) and her staff of coaches. These are people who are committed to teaching young children the importance and value of a disciplined mind.

Our school systems need to follow that lead and integrate formalized Emotional Mastery courses and classes into the curricula. These Mental Mastery tools, when learned at an early age, will beautifully and profoundly alter the way a child’s life unfolds. Because it will profoundly alter the way that child views life – from the place of a creator.

Here’s a profound exercise that we can all benefit from:

Start catching yourself complaining, and replace those complaints with expressions of gratitude. Literally turn the language around 180 degrees. Complaining is one of the weakest practices ever. It propagates the victim mentality. So start stopping. And switch into the high vibrational state of gratitude and appreciation. From that state, we activate creativity. We strengthen the inner world. Mastery ensues. And then the results. And it feels a hell of a lot better.

One of the most profound observations that I’ve made over the years in my work as a Coach, Mental Toughness Trainer, and even way back in the day as a Social Worker, is that humans are at their best when they feel their best.

Which means we all have tremendous incentive to become more masterful at creating the high vibe moods – feeling great.

The biggest mistake that I observe people making in the pursuit of excellence and their dreams is WAITING. We’ve been conditioned to wait for some set of circumstances to be different in order to feel the moods or emotional states that catapult us into creativity, greatness, success and the results we desire. We wait for a promotion or a stellar performance review before we feel competent. We wait for a victory before we feel athletic. We wait for the report card that shows a high GPA before we feel intelligent. And that’s a huge waste of time!

Ask the champions of the world, like Michael Allen, what the psychological key to their success is and they’ll tell you that it’s to reverse the equation. Instead of RESULTS –> FEELING GOOD, switch it around to FEELING GOOD –> RESULTS.

Often when people first hear this they say, “Yeah but doesn’t preparedness and talent have something to with success as well?” And the obvious answer is of course it does! But all that talent and preparedness goes right out the window when it isn’t supported by a disciplined mind – one that is willing to choose to start with the masterful moods.

I’ve come across some exceptionally skilled folks in my life that have never achieved or experienced greatness because they paralyze their talents with doubt, and by waiting for results – proof. And, I’ve met some remarkably successful folks who self-admittedly have very little raw talent who get much more out of the little skill that they have by prioritizing belief, and by not waiting for results to feel great.

So the bottom line here is simple: let yourself feel great first! NOW! Don’t wait. How? Like anything else that involves mastery – with practice.

If you’d like a suggestion for a specific Mental Toughness Tool that’ll help you out with this, click here http://bit.ly/cyHT3m to check out a recent Miraculous Life email bulletin I wrote on how to put your Game Face on.

When I ask Michael Allen these days why he plays golf, his answer is, “Because it’s fun.” When I ask him why he wants to be the first ever human to win his first event on the Champions Tour and then win a PGA Tour event he says, “Because it’s fun.” When I ask him why he puts so much effort into his preparation and physical training, “Fun.”

Let the intelligence of light-heartedness do its magic for you. Because it’s fun!

p.s. The video ends abruptly because the camera was full and it shut itself off during the recording. But what was missed in the video was captured in the writing.

p.p.s. I really welcome your comments and suggestions for content for future posts, so don’t hesitate to submit any thoughts you might have.

It’s not easy, is it? And why would it be? After all, it’s your brain’s job to think. But with practice, it can be trained to be quiet.

And why would I ever want my brain to be quiet? A few reasons:

Increased ability to experience peace

Reduced anxiety

Increased confidence

Better health

More efficient access to memory, ideas, creativity

Increased physical coordination

Increased problem solving ability

Increased levels of patience

Increased levels of compassion

Increased ability to manifest more of what you want with less effort

Increased productivity

Increased levels of energy

Relaxation

Heightened awareness to thoughts and emotions

Less defensiveness

Less anger

Increased focus

Present Moment Alertness

Improved job performance

Improved athletic performance

Imagine that your brain has two settings, ON and OFF. We’re quite familiar with the ON. It’s how we spend the vast majority of our existence. And thank God for the ON, for if we didn’t have the ability to think, we’d be totally dysfunctional. But there’s a whole other realm to be explored. The OFF. Also referred to as the discontinuity, or The Gap, it’s a magical state where we transcend thought and enter the world of infinite possibilities. The realm of pure potentiality.

In this state of stillness and spaciousness we remember that we are inextricably connected to all that is. We experience infinite peace. Fear is a product of thinking. Specifically, thinking about what could go wrong. In the absence of thought, there can be no fear. And in the absence of fear, there is only peace, compassion, love, and lightness of being.

Practicing creating stillness doesn’t actually result in stillness in all areas of the brain. In fact, it activates one part of the brain (the neocortex, or frontal lobe), but it quiets another part (the thalamus). The result is called coherence. And the benefits of coherence, as you see in the list above, are numerous. This practice of getting in the “OFF’, so to speak, results in mastery in all forms.

And the practice is so simple.

How do you get in the Gap?

Give yourself twenty minutes to do this practice. Sit quietly somewhere you will not be interrupted or distracted. You will do this practice silently in your mind with your eyes closed.

1. Begin the practice by taking a couple deep breaths and then ask yourself and answer the following 3 questions:

Who am I?

What do I want?

What is my Life Purpose?

Reflecting upon these three questions will serve to remind you of who you are and want to be, what you desire for your life and for others’, and of your ultimate mission – that which is more important to you than anything else, something that you will be proud to say you honored consistently as you grow older. This life purpose will involve in some way, making a contribution to the world.

2. Once you have reflected upon those questions and answered them, it’s time to begin the actual gap meditation.

Simply sit comfortably with your eyes closed and begin to quiet the mind. Become an observer of the mind. Observe the thoughts that arise and remember that you are not those thoughts.

3. As you notice the thoughts that your mind is generating, simply and gently release them as if to release the pressure of holding onto a small helium filled balloon. And simply continue to repeat that practice for the duration of the meditation. It’s simply a practice of noticing and releasing the thoughts that our minds create. It’s a practice of conditioning the mind into a higher functioning state of coherence. Ultimately, you will experience gaps in thinking, spaces of thoughtlessness. That happens spontaneously as a result of the practice. Notice those gaps and over time experience what it is like to permit yourself to stay in those gaps longer and longer before exiting it by generating the next thought.

ENJOY!

You’ll notice many things as you practice the meditation, but one thing to pay particular attention to is the lightness that you feel when you release an unpleasant thought. You will invariably get caught up in some disturbing or anxiety provoking thought. Then you’ll remember that you don’t need it. You’ll release it. And the subsequent experience will be that you return to peace and lightness. This peace or lightness of being is your natural state. It never disappears. You are eternally enveloped within it. You can only render yourself incapable of experiencing it with negative thinking. As you practice The Gap, you’ll be strengthening your ability to make that same shift throughout your day. The shift from unnecessary suffering back to peace. And as a result, you’ll feel better, and activate mastery in all you do.